nafod wrote:Again, to the victims it mattered zero whether the shooter was a raghead on a mission for Allah, or a teen living the nihilist dream. Indistinguishable.

The US FBI doesn't agree with you, Nafod.

I’m ok with that. Their immediate purpose was to cause terror. You think of a better name.

Mass murderer.

If we cared about not terrorizing children we wouldn't inflict "mass shooter" drills on them. We would find other ways of securing schools. A lot of kids complain about those drills and obsess about them. The School Teachers feel that they're promoting safety AND they get to "raise awareness of gun violence" by doing them.

Re: poster one post above. Is it that hard to get the difference between THAN and THEN?!!!

Same for their and there, your and you're. English speakers generally don't speak foreign language, so at least get you own up to (some sort of) scratch!

A lot of progressives are well educated and tend to dismiss misspellings and poor use of words as a sign of "ignorance". The grammar errors engage their "stop think". Makes me wonder if it's done on purpose, to disarm the opposition and allow the message to reach the undecided.

In other cases it's just piss poor proof reading. Than/then, their/they're/there, loose/lose and so on.

Re: poster one post above. Is it that hard to get the difference between THAN and THEN?!!!

Same for their and there, your and you're. English speakers generally don't speak foreign language, so at least get you own up to (some sort of) scratch!

A lot of progressives are well educated and tend to dismiss misspellings and poor use of words as a sign of "ignorance". The grammar errors engage their "stop think". Makes me wonder if it's done on purpose, to disarm the opposition and allow the message to reach the undecided.

In other cases it's just piss poor proof reading. Than/then, their/they're/there, loose/lose and so on.

In the nineties in Russia they came up with "Olbanian" language, or язык падонкаф, "language of bastards", purposely badly misspelled. Some said they did it to fool Internet translators, but it was mostly used for the vibe. So in my case it would be: am not shoer if ziz miteiks ar ust on perpos tu meik epojnt but it irriteitszefak utta mee.

If we cared about not terrorizing children we wouldn't inflict "mass shooter" drills on them.

The drills work, and save lives.

From the Atlantic....

Zachary Levinsky, a lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, is one of few academics who has studied active-shooter drills. He argues that though some school violence always existed, Columbine marked a shift of the burden of prevention: “Schools were somehow positioned as blamable—as responsible for these massacres.” This created an institutional concern for reputational risk management. To implement something like an active-shooter drill was to signal to parents and the community that the school is being proactive—it was doing something.

Of course, a demand for action does not often make for prudent decisions when it comes to harm reduction. Drills cover administrator and school-district liability, and they may make parents feel better knowing that their kids are in a school that’s taking decisive action. But what are the longer-term effects on the children’s health and development?

Studies of whether active-shooter drills actually prevent harm are all but impossible. Case studies are difficult to parse. In Parkland, for example, the site of the recent shooting, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, had an active-shooter drill just last month. The shooter had been through such drills. Purposely countering them may have been a reason that, as he was beginning his rampage, the shooter pulled a fire alarm.

But what exactly these drills entail is difficult to pin down. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Education Department told Newsweek there's no national procedure schools are required to follow. Instead, protocol is set at the local level.

Community leaders often have to figure out for themselves whether active shooter drills are worth the resources and, if so, how they should be conducted. It's a daunting task from the outset because such plans aren't one-size-fits-all.

That said, there's disagreement over where to draw the line. Nickerson explained that some people insist school personnel and students need to feel a level of anxiety during shooter drills in order to take them seriously. That has led to full-scale exercises like the one at Troy Buchanan High School in Missouri in 2014, in which police officers fired blanks to simulate an attack while theater student "victims" sustained faux bullet wounds. Or the one at Jewett Middle Academy in Winter Haven, Florida the same year, which caused a brief panic because administrators didn't tell teachers or parents about it in advance.

Intense approaches like those can traumatize young students, Nickerson said. The National Association of School Psychologists and National Association of School Resource Officers have said maneuvers like simulated gunfire can trigger everything from asthma attacks to hysterics, so drills need to be conducted carefully.

"The message needs to be, 'We're doing this to keep you safe. Not, oh my gosh, you could be the next one because school shootings are rampant,'" Nickerson said.

In the nineties in Russia they came up with "Olbanian" language, or язык падонкаф, "language of bastards", purposely badly misspelled. Some said they did it to fool Internet translators, but it was mostly used for the vibe. So in my case it would be: am not shoer if ziz miteiks ar ust on perpos tu meik epojnt but it irriteitszefak utta mee.

I doubt that these characters in the US misspell on purpose. They probably don't make posters too often. Some of them might be illiterate. About ten percent of US citizens don't have basic literacy skills.

Others in the US cannot think in long logical chains. They think in sound bites. If you try to reason with them beyond about three inferences they crumble or get angry at you.

https://reason.com/blog/2018/08/28/fede ... ly-overestThe Department of Education (DOE) says that there were 235 school shootings in the 2015–16 school year. But when NPR double-checked the figure, it found that only 11 could be independently confirmed. A full 161 of the reported shootings—some two-thirds of the alleged total—did not happen at all. Another four incidents were miscategorized. (In one case, for example, a cap gun was fired on a school bus. In another, a student posted a picture online of himself holding a gun, at home, on a Saturday.) And 59 could neither be confirmed or disconfirmed, since the districts never responded to NPR's inquiries.

Ventura Unified School District in Southern California reported 27 school shootings to the DOE but told NPR that the correct number was zero. An assistant superintendent speculated that someone had hit the wrong button by mistake.

Cleveland's school district reported 37 shooting incidents to the DOE, then told NPR that this was actually the number of times people had been caught on school grounds with a firearm or a knife. Someone had accidentally entered the number on the wrong line.

The DOE tells NPR that all this data will have to stay in the system, as the department's deadline for corrections has closed. But the department will amend its latest survey with a note about the problems NPR uncovered.

"Prepare your hearts as a fortress, for there will be no other." -Francisco Pizarro González

https://reason.com/blog/2018/08/28/fede ... ly-overest
The Department of Education (DOE) says that there were 235 school shootings in the 2015–16 school year. But when NPR double-checked the figure, it found that only 11 could be independently confirmed. A full 161 of the reported shootings—some two-thirds of the alleged total—did not happen at all.

Another four incidents were miscategorized. (In one case, for example, a cap gun was fired on a school bus. In another, a student posted a picture online of himself holding a gun, at home, on a Saturday.) And 59 could neither be confirmed or disconfirmed, since the districts never responded to NPR's inquiries.
...
Cleveland's school district reported 37 shooting incidents to the DOE, then told NPR that this was actually the number of times people had been caught on school grounds with a firearm or a knife. Someone had accidentally entered the number on the wrong line.
The DOE tells NPR that all this data will have to stay in the system, as the department's deadline for corrections has closed. But the department will amend its latest survey with a note about the problems NPR uncovered.

How very bureaucratic.

“War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. Other simple remedies were within their choice. You know it and they know it, but they wanted war, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― William Tecumseh Sherman